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Thursday, 11 September 2014

I was asked recently
by a journalist from the Press Association to comment on the anonymous
sitePencourage.

It has been dubbed as the anti-social
network and the 'real-life Facebook' because users are encouraged to be
completely honest about their lives.

The journalist's specific question was: Is it a good thing that we can vent our true feelings and not have to
hide behind the 'fake' profiles we build on sites like Facebook?

Here are my thoughts
and at the end is a link to the published article which puts them in context:

Pencourage is reselling
us the popular fantasy that we have a single authentic self and it tells us that it can help us give vent to that self,
without feeling the kind of social pressures that regulate our behaviour on Facebook. For a social scientist the two problems are that we
don’t have such a self and that we are exchanging one set of pressures for
another.

Our lives are a
series of performances that take account of the social setting and the
audience. Sociologist Erving Goffman established this convincingly in the 60s. In that sense we have multiple selves and now, one of those selves may be
our Facebook presence. Our profile is not ‘fake’, but it might give rise to
some mental discomfort as we deal with how different audiences come together
and we decide what we should reveal in that environment.

Pencourage is another
avenue for another one of our many selves. Here, what we post is still
influenced by considerations such as the thought that it must be interesting
enough to gain the attention of the audience. This will encourage certain
things to be written, in certain ways.

It might be
instructive to look at the situation in Trinidad, where people have the same
concern about how to portray ones true self, but the conclusions about how to
do this are very different. Anthropologists have reported that just as in
Carnival, where the mask you create is said to reveal your true personality,
Facebook profiles are said to do the same. So you don’t need a Pencourage
account to be true to yourself: Ironically, more about your 'real' self is said to be revealed by the
Facebook profile you create.

The takeaway point for businesses is that they really need to understand the social worlds they are launching products and services into. Would Pencourage's message resonate as strongly in Trinidad? The takeaway point for social scientists working
in the commercial world is that popular perceptions as much as behavioural ‘reality’
could provide a sound basis for a business. Time will tell whether Pencourage
is one such business…